A post shared by Jack Starbuck (@thatstarbuck) on May 11, 2017 at 8:20am PDT

I’ve taught some very interesting groups in my time:

Students that have found the free U2 album on the ipads and played music while recording river measurements

A-level biologists from London that have played hide-and-seek after class because they’ve never been to the countryside

“Miss, can woodlice fly? I bet they can.”

“Miss, is that a cow?” [Points at black & white horse]

A KS2 group that had to almost run back to centre from Box Hill after a freak thunderstorm, getting drenched by the time we were back (It was actually in Reigate)

A KS2 student that decided to make “leaf angels” with me (You rock!)

Every single student that’s sung the Banana song the next morning after a campfire

My last group that cheered so hard, and climbed on each other’s shoulders (in Bebbington. I feared for their heads)

All the students that have tried to jump the River Tillingbourne at Crossways, especially those that have failed (especially the ones that failed on camera!)

The students that have gotten stuck in Pagham Harbour with big muddy smiles

The students that wanted to spray paint rocks to investigate longshore drift (always a good idea!)

The KS2 children that made themselves beards out of burrs and stickyweed

The children that have fallen in the River Mole at the Stepping Stones (or leapt)

The Real Family Holiday families and children who have all been so curious- those that have climbed the starfish (I fear for you), the amazing red-haired super-mum who pushed a double buggy all the way to the shelter building area, the sweet kids that sat and made apple bird-feeders for hours last year, the huge set of families that made the most incredible shelter I’ve ever seen, that sat about 10 and didn’t leak a drop!

All the lovely schools that have brightened my days with thank-you letters…

I’ve had such a good time while I’ve been here (in all weathers- sun, rain, snow, thunderstorms), with so many incredible memories. Perhaps one day I’ll come back to teach again! After all, I haven’t yet had a pond named after me like Kate (one of our recent Education Assistants).

June is fast approaching (somehow!) and is the month for biodiversity, it seems. This morning I’ve been doing a little bit of research to promote three different fantastic biodiversity projects in June, and made ourselves a board with loads of information and resources for the coming month.

30 Days Wild- All of June

Set up last year, 30 Days Wild is an awesome drive by the Wildlife Trusts to get more people outside and interacting with nature. Individuals can sign up here for a pack, which contains things like a calendar for the month, stickers, a badge, and some ideas of what to do! There are loads of free activities that the Wildlife Trusts are putting on too, which is pretty cool as it means people really have the opportunity to get out and explore.

They also have an app, which you can download for some quick ideas to get outside in nature. I’ve not downloaded it yet (too many other recording apps!) but from a quick glance, it looks pretty fun.

National Insect Week- 20-26th June

National Insect Week is a bi-annual event run by the Royal Entomological Society promoting insects. There are tons of events occurring during the week all over the country, which is pretty cool really, as insects are sometimes undervalued- especially the ones that aren’t “pretty”.

The section of NIW’s website I like the best is the Learning Resources area (I guess that says a lot…)- there are loads of activities and things to do; worksheets and things to read, lesson plans, podcasts and websites. Fantastic!

Great British Bee Count- 19th May- 30th June

Run by the Friends of the Earth, the Great British Bee Count mostly revolves around an app used to count bees. When I first downloaded it only 10 bees had been counted- now it’s over 18,000! When you spot a bee, you can record it on the app. There are handy pictures too, which makes it easy to work out what you’re looking at. It even has a few non-bees that look like bees (like wasps and bee-flies).

Record all of the bees

You can also do a timed count, watching a 50cm area for 1 minute and recording all the bees that visit the flowers you’re watching.

Putting together all these cool biodiversity projects into one board was a bit of a challenge, and I might have gotten overexcited… But there’s so much to look forward to in June!

On the 11th and 12th of January, staff from Field Studies Centres all over the South East region came to Juniper Hall for regional training. Very exciting! Two days of lectures (and lots of FSC fun) lined up, with speakers from Juniper Hall, other centres and outside guest speakers too. All fun for us at the centre, and visiting staff from the other London centres (Amersham, Epping Forest and the London Projects), Flatford Mill, and Slapton Ley.

Tasty insect snacks on the tables- Yum!

The day kicked off at about 10am with an overview of the geography specification updates, and sharing of resources for new A-level biology. Everything’s changing this year in the exam specifications, so we’re updating all our teaching resources. We’re trying to get away from using powerpoints, as they’re a little overused at the moment, and instead trying out programmes like SMART notebook, and apps like Popplet and FreezePaint. With any luck I might get a chance a bit later on in the term to write another blog post about those!

Next, Jo from Flatford Mill talked about “Immersive Ecology”, an exciting new session to engage students with ecology. We’re very excited about this, and eager to implement it at Juniper Hall- it’s a new session at the start of residential courses, designed to get students thinking about ecology and how amazing a topic it is, rather than throwing them right into hardcore coursework or controlled assessments. Hopefully we’ll get to teach it very soon!

After, we had a look at some of new resources, we moved on to looking at Field Network Systems, which allow immediate upload of data collected in the field to the web, using a remote wireless network that can just be put in a safety sack and turned on. This was very exciting to investigate by the ponds- we did a little data collection ourselves, recording the water boatmen, daphnia and flatworms wriggling around in our nets.

Heading back inside for a while, we investigated some new apps to use with tablets (such as freeze paint, like I mentioned before). There are some really cool teaching tools I’m excited to use in the future.

After lunch, we took a walk up to Broadwood’s Tower as a group and back down through Happy Valley, slipping and sliding our way through the woods. It’s quite muddy at the moment, but thankfully outdoor tutors are always prepared with their walking boots!

Looking out over the Burford Spur

Back in the Templeton Room, we covered peer observation and how it can be used for personal development, how courses can be reviewed effectively to make them more engaging and relevant, and how to implement questioning in sessions to get the best out of students. This session was led by external speaker Caroline Upson, who gave us valuable advice on illustrating standards of work. In the future, we intend on making “success criteria” for different presentation methods, to show the level if detail required to achieve different grades.

Success criteria for drawing cross-profiles

It was a good high to end the day on, having created some useful new resources to use in teaching. After dinner, we headed as a group to the local pub to catch up on news and enjoy different company. The hardier of us headed later to the Ice House for a campfire under the stars- I was told it was lovely, but very cold!

Day two started off with something a little different; guest speaker Lisa Minshull came in to update our maths skills beyond the statistics we all know (and love!!) to teach. It was pretty tough at times- my maths is not quite as good as it’d like to be- but very rewarding when even I managed to get some of the answers right! Hooray!

The maths wall

The last session of the day pulled together everything we had learned over the past day and a half. Working in our centre groups, we looked at what we could take from training to put into resource development and teaching. There were a lot of really great ideas flying around, and I think we all got a lot out of two days of training- certainly I did!